They did the same to me. My facial hair is pretty thick though, so I can use a cartridge like twice before I start cutting myself too much. I realized that an electric razor was cheaper. $60 once, will last ~2 yrs, where a pack of Mach 3 blades is like $10 for 4, and I go through that in 2 weeks. So for me, electric razor = 12 weeks of shaving with a mach3. No they don't shave as close, but I don't get cut and I'm not forking over a couple hundred to gilette a year.
Actually Apple contracts all this stuff out to companies in China. The iBooks and iPods are built by Asus, I believe. Apple used to do their own manufacturing, but for smaller devices where assembly and manufacture are basically one and the same (laptops, ibooks, etc) they do in China by contracting to PC companies. My PowerBook was shipped UPS from Shanghai (I had some BTO options in there.)
The music industry is just greedy and they're completely out of control. Someone needs to shut them down and quick. However, without their money many artists probably wouldn't get their albums published, so it's kind of a necessary evil that we have to deal with.
This is the kind of BS that keeps these guys going. You can record a CD in your bedroom (home recording gear/software has progressed a LOT.) You can burn your own CDs. Record stores are disappearing (noticed how many of them have closed in the last 5 years?) Distribution is going online. Almost anyone can sell CDs on Amazon (their distribution terms are very favorable to smaller labels; look at the revolution in the book publishing industry for precedent.) No longer are the major publishers in control.
Once bands figure this out (and they already are) everyone stands to benefit. No more dealing with DRM on your discs, best yet, you can own your own songs. The big kicker with most record contracts is that you have to sign over your rights to your music to the record company. It's not like you can argue the terms of a record contract if you're an up-and-coming band; if they don't sign you they'll sign the next band that will agree to their terms.
With the RIAA cartel, the artist has no say in HOW their music is published. The RIAA will still pump out CDs, but I already get much of my music from bands who chose not to go with a major label. These guys are dinosaurs, evolution will take its course.
Seeing as we haven't quite perfected the RFID-implanted-in-humans thing, all they have to do is put them in those giant mouse ears.
Seriously though, with 2 RFID chips in the mouse ears you could use it like a triangulation device, determining a field of vision by measuring the signal strength between the tags, from there determining where the sucke-- I mean valued customer, is looking.
You would be surprised. There's not a whole lot you can do when your network gets hammered by 20,000 zombie cable modems going full throttle from around the world. You can filter the traffic at the various backbones, or through someone with a *really* fat pipe, but 1-2 gbit/s is a lot of data.
Large botnets of trojaned machines are pretty powerful. There are ways of beating them but it requires money. And once you beat a decent hacker one way, he won't let you do it again.
Or just tie the version IDs into the install key. Not too hard to do (different version keys checksum to different values.) MS already does this anyway; you can't use a Dell XP pro install disk and a retail XP pro key, it won't work. Same deal with the educational keys.
The hackers will always do what they feel like. As long as you make it hard enough for everyone else you've done your job.
You answered your own question there. The hydrogen economy is *not* uneconomical, but the fossil fuel based method of making it is. Fossil fuels (coal, petroleum distillates, natural gas, etc.) will run out. Maybe not in our lifetimes, but probably in our immediate offspring's lives. They will become scarce in our lifetime, and very expensive. When this happens, economics takes hold and the cheapest solution appropriate for a global scale will be used.
Nuclear power is a short-term solution. It's pretty clean, nuclear reactors are safe (at least far safer than gasoline refineries; if you live on the southeast side of Houston, you know what I mean.) We'll eventually figure out how to make fusion work, I think it's only a matter of time. But the nuclear/hydrogen combo is pretty clean compared to the double whammy of coal/gasoline. And soon to be much cheaper in comparison.
If there were more than 2-5 decent games released a year, people would probably play them. As it is, I can blow through most single player games in less than a week and WoW gives me the constant gaming fix.
People hate WoW. But they play it because there's nothing else. FPS games have remained largely stagnant since Half-Life (HL2 and doom were pretty but offered nothing revolutionary) RTS games since WC3...
Give us something better than WoW and people will play it.
Libel/defamation also only applies when there is blatant disregard for the truth. Opinion is also protected speech. As long as you say something like "I think CmdrTaco is a pigfucker" does not imply the same thing as "News Flash! CmdrTaco caught fucking a pig!" The "I think" is also not necessary (or shouldn't be) because EVERYTHING on a message board is considered opinion unless backed up by references.
A different circumstance would be if you started astroturfing on message boards that your competitor's product caused cancer when it did not.
In any case, this is probably a stunt by this SEO company to boost their Google rating by getting their page plastered all over blogs everywhere. They know how to manipulate Google better than anybody and the SEO business is pretty sleazy to begin with (I personally consider them just a half-step above spammers.)
The N64 was no failure; there were a bunch of great games and a lot of people played them. The PSX had longer legs though, simply because games became loaded with FMV and spread across 5 discs.
Too late:) Blizzard is distributing 14 day limited accounts (cannot trade items with other players, cannot talk in general chat channels and there's a cap of level 20.) They're basically just dropping them in with some magazines (I forget which ones) so you should be able to try it out pretty cheap. Just beware, it's pretty addicting..
Sounds like Wal-Mart. They will accept almost anything for a full refund, literally. I remember reading about a case where a guy bought a knife from Wal-Mart, killed someone with it, then cleaned it off and returned it. I've seen friends buy DVD players/camcorders, use them for 3 days and return them missing cables and tapes. Most of the people working there are borderline retarded anyway, so I guess it's just cheaper to hire idiots than actually process returns correctly.
Ehh, Circuit City's sales people are usually tards but their prices aren't too bad. Yeah you can usually find it lower but they pricematch and have a generally good selection on some items (TVs in particular.) If you know what you're shopping for you can sometimes find a deal.
The scroll ball thing is already available on apple's laptops, and let me tell you, once you've used it, you'll wonder why nobody thought of this sooner. Two fingers on the touch pad lets you scroll up and down, side to side. Great for web pages, PDFs, image editing, everything.
And you can turn it off in the Control Panel under Mouse settings. The option just doesn't show up unless your input device supports it.
I made a QoS Linux router two years ago; it's nothing special. Just set a bandwidth restriction via iptables on your net connection slightly lower than the max. Then use some sort of QoS scheme to prioritize certain packets in the internal queue. There are plenty of howtos and pre-rolled scripts for this; if you're operating a Linux router then you probably already have the tools (maybe you'll have to recompile a kernel if you're using an old kernel.) FYI this system made a business cable connection work in a house of 31 college students, so speed isn't a problem.
Why? The market cannot support 3 consoles, plain and simple. Most people will have one of the three. Some power gamers will have 2; almost nobody will have all three. So now you're a game developer and you're making a game. You've gotta pick one, because the costs of developing for all three are prohibitive (unless you're EA making crappy licensed movie games.)
The net result here is that with more consoles in the market, each game will sell *fewer* copies. I know there were a few Xbox games I wanted to play, but didn't, because I already had a PS2 and a gamecube and couldn't justify shelling out $150 for another console.
Nintendo will probably be the next casualty (it happened to Atari when Sega challenged Nintendo, and it happened to Sega when MS challenged Sony and Nintendo.) That's a shame; I can only hope they will remake themself as a top-tier game publisher/developer because their games have always been great. They've pretty much bowed out of the hardware arms race with the Nintendo Revolution, a low-powered hardware design compared to the PS3 and XB360. Too bad they don't have the developer support anymore to make it work.
Actually Nintendo has been making games for a hell of a lot longer than MS or Sony have been around:) They started as a playing card manufacturer in the late 1800s and put out Mario Bros. in ~1985 and well, the rest is history.
There hasn't really been a noteworthy game release in the past six months on any platform. GTA: San Andreas was the last 'Killer App' and it's so expensive to just produce a par game that the development cycle has really slowed to just a handful of companies who can consistantly put out games before getting bought by EA.
PC, PS2, Xbox.. none of them have had any decent releases recently. Most everyone I know has gotten bored of and then gone back to World of Warcraft because there really isn't anything out there. The video game world is dying a slow death due to the skyrocketing costs of game development. There are maybe half a dozen big releases a year on any platform; just like hollywood most game companies are mired in a rut of endless sequels to dead franchises. Even GTA is getting old. Give us something new.
Basically, the OP is saying that this guy is probably the kind of guy who sits around at a strip club all day doing blow off some chick's ass. Do that to the wrong guy's girlfriend and you're liable to get your head beaten in. Which is probably closer to the truth than a real-life SpamAssassin.
Yeah this is a troll. If not, you need to take an economics class.
The way corporations operate may be bad, but it's no worse than the nobles in the monarchies of europe. Corporations made it possible for the common man to get involved in ownership of a large company, which was previously limited to only the super-rich. At least now, if I see Microsoft getting rich and I am jealous, I can just go buy a piece of Microsoft and share in the wealth.
You posit a socialist world, which Soviet Russia proved was good on paper, but a spectacular failure in practice. The Chinese are learning from the mistakes of the USSR by EMBRACING corporate capitalism while keeping the government involved.
Greed runs the world. Bitch about it all you like, but this is the way it always has been and always will be. The only way to be safe from greed is to be greedy yourself. Even if the US were to pass laws forbidding profitable corporations, nothing would change. They would simply move to China or Russia or Canada. If you are not greedy, someone else will be and you'll just be poor. If everyone is not greedy, it just takes one greedy person to amass resources and abuse power. On the other hand, if everyone is greedy, things will eventually work out.
20th century economics has taught us that governments cannot control the economy, they can only guide it. The economy is controlled by market forces; the mass will of the people. It is folly to try and "dream of a better system" because the system dictates itself. Even if you could think of something better, the goal could only be to make more money, or else nobody will bother.
Stop trolling on slashdot and go out and learn stuff about the world. We all wish for the world to be a better place but there are some facts about the world and the nature of people that we have to operate within.
Best part is that cops in speed traps in Texas make it a point to show up for court, just to deter people from doing it. Any of the small townships inside Houston or Austin are especially bad (Westlake, Lakeway, West University, Bellaire, etc.)
It could be worse though; it could be Louisiana. If you are an out of state motorist who gets a ticket, you get escorted to the nearest courthouse by the officer where you get to enter your plea.
Hah, nah, you don't stop having fun, you just usually start enjoying other forms of fun (going to the bar with your buddies, having kinky sex with your girlfriend, whatever) over sitting around your apartment playing video games with a bunch of 13 year old kids (ever played WoW with teamspeak? yeah, the average age of this game is about 13.) I had a raging WoW addiction my last semester in college, but I was taking 9 hours and I could still play WoW and do everything else I wanted to do.
There are a lot of people who, through either a physical handicap or just reclusiveness don't get out much. If you lead a "normal" life with a 9-5 job or friends and a family, you will never be able to compete with the best. So accept it, move on, and you can still have some fun with the game, but it shouldn't be the focus of your life.
Also keep in mind that while Krol Blade is a good weapon, the "best" stuff (the items that will turn you into a 1 man asskicking machine) is not even available for purchase. The best sellable equpiment is UBRS level gear (lv 50-55 epics) which any dope with 2 weeks to run UBRS will get something comparable anyway.
Anyone who has played WoW past 60 knows how often the auction house gets used.. It's primarily a source for sub-60 items and equipment; most of the higher level stuff is privately traded among friends.
I don't see this ruining the economy. Gold was already very plentiful without having to give it away. Scarcity was always a part of WoW, but there is a point at which you outgrow the economy right around the middle of Molten Core, and I think a lot of players are at or near that point.
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They did the same to me. My facial hair is pretty thick though, so I can use a cartridge like twice before I start cutting myself too much. I realized that an electric razor was cheaper. $60 once, will last ~2 yrs, where a pack of Mach 3 blades is like $10 for 4, and I go through that in 2 weeks. So for me, electric razor = 12 weeks of shaving with a mach3. No they don't shave as close, but I don't get cut and I'm not forking over a couple hundred to gilette a year.
Actually Apple contracts all this stuff out to companies in China. The iBooks and iPods are built by Asus, I believe. Apple used to do their own manufacturing, but for smaller devices where assembly and manufacture are basically one and the same (laptops, ibooks, etc) they do in China by contracting to PC companies. My PowerBook was shipped UPS from Shanghai (I had some BTO options in there.)
The music industry is just greedy and they're completely out of control. Someone needs to shut them down and quick. However, without their money many artists probably wouldn't get their albums published, so it's kind of a necessary evil that we have to deal with.
This is the kind of BS that keeps these guys going. You can record a CD in your bedroom (home recording gear/software has progressed a LOT.) You can burn your own CDs. Record stores are disappearing (noticed how many of them have closed in the last 5 years?) Distribution is going online. Almost anyone can sell CDs on Amazon (their distribution terms are very favorable to smaller labels; look at the revolution in the book publishing industry for precedent.) No longer are the major publishers in control.
Once bands figure this out (and they already are) everyone stands to benefit. No more dealing with DRM on your discs, best yet, you can own your own songs. The big kicker with most record contracts is that you have to sign over your rights to your music to the record company. It's not like you can argue the terms of a record contract if you're an up-and-coming band; if they don't sign you they'll sign the next band that will agree to their terms.
With the RIAA cartel, the artist has no say in HOW their music is published. The RIAA will still pump out CDs, but I already get much of my music from bands who chose not to go with a major label. These guys are dinosaurs, evolution will take its course.
Seeing as we haven't quite perfected the RFID-implanted-in-humans thing, all they have to do is put them in those giant mouse ears.
Seriously though, with 2 RFID chips in the mouse ears you could use it like a triangulation device, determining a field of vision by measuring the signal strength between the tags, from there determining where the sucke-- I mean valued customer, is looking.
You would be surprised. There's not a whole lot you can do when your network gets hammered by 20,000 zombie cable modems going full throttle from around the world. You can filter the traffic at the various backbones, or through someone with a *really* fat pipe, but 1-2 gbit/s is a lot of data.
Large botnets of trojaned machines are pretty powerful. There are ways of beating them but it requires money. And once you beat a decent hacker one way, he won't let you do it again.
Or just tie the version IDs into the install key. Not too hard to do (different version keys checksum to different values.) MS already does this anyway; you can't use a Dell XP pro install disk and a retail XP pro key, it won't work. Same deal with the educational keys.
The hackers will always do what they feel like. As long as you make it hard enough for everyone else you've done your job.
Better than German roulette. They play that with a Luger.
You answered your own question there. The hydrogen economy is *not* uneconomical, but the fossil fuel based method of making it is. Fossil fuels (coal, petroleum distillates, natural gas, etc.) will run out. Maybe not in our lifetimes, but probably in our immediate offspring's lives. They will become scarce in our lifetime, and very expensive. When this happens, economics takes hold and the cheapest solution appropriate for a global scale will be used.
Nuclear power is a short-term solution. It's pretty clean, nuclear reactors are safe (at least far safer than gasoline refineries; if you live on the southeast side of Houston, you know what I mean.) We'll eventually figure out how to make fusion work, I think it's only a matter of time. But the nuclear/hydrogen combo is pretty clean compared to the double whammy of coal/gasoline. And soon to be much cheaper in comparison.
If there were more than 2-5 decent games released a year, people would probably play them. As it is, I can blow through most single player games in less than a week and WoW gives me the constant gaming fix.
People hate WoW. But they play it because there's nothing else. FPS games have remained largely stagnant since Half-Life (HL2 and doom were pretty but offered nothing revolutionary) RTS games since WC3...
Give us something better than WoW and people will play it.
Libel/defamation also only applies when there is blatant disregard for the truth. Opinion is also protected speech. As long as you say something like "I think CmdrTaco is a pigfucker" does not imply the same thing as "News Flash! CmdrTaco caught fucking a pig!" The "I think" is also not necessary (or shouldn't be) because EVERYTHING on a message board is considered opinion unless backed up by references.
A different circumstance would be if you started astroturfing on message boards that your competitor's product caused cancer when it did not.
In any case, this is probably a stunt by this SEO company to boost their Google rating by getting their page plastered all over blogs everywhere. They know how to manipulate Google better than anybody and the SEO business is pretty sleazy to begin with (I personally consider them just a half-step above spammers.)
The N64 was no failure; there were a bunch of great games and a lot of people played them. The PSX had longer legs though, simply because games became loaded with FMV and spread across 5 discs.
Too late :) Blizzard is distributing 14 day limited accounts (cannot trade items with other players, cannot talk in general chat channels and there's a cap of level 20.) They're basically just dropping them in with some magazines (I forget which ones) so you should be able to try it out pretty cheap. Just beware, it's pretty addicting..
Sounds like Wal-Mart. They will accept almost anything for a full refund, literally. I remember reading about a case where a guy bought a knife from Wal-Mart, killed someone with it, then cleaned it off and returned it. I've seen friends buy DVD players/camcorders, use them for 3 days and return them missing cables and tapes. Most of the people working there are borderline retarded anyway, so I guess it's just cheaper to hire idiots than actually process returns correctly.
Ehh, Circuit City's sales people are usually tards but their prices aren't too bad. Yeah you can usually find it lower but they pricematch and have a generally good selection on some items (TVs in particular.) If you know what you're shopping for you can sometimes find a deal.
The scroll ball thing is already available on apple's laptops, and let me tell you, once you've used it, you'll wonder why nobody thought of this sooner. Two fingers on the touch pad lets you scroll up and down, side to side. Great for web pages, PDFs, image editing, everything.
And you can turn it off in the Control Panel under Mouse settings. The option just doesn't show up unless your input device supports it.
Yep, same sort of situation only a co-op. The house used to be a sorority house though.
I made a QoS Linux router two years ago; it's nothing special. Just set a bandwidth restriction via iptables on your net connection slightly lower than the max. Then use some sort of QoS scheme to prioritize certain packets in the internal queue. There are plenty of howtos and pre-rolled scripts for this; if you're operating a Linux router then you probably already have the tools (maybe you'll have to recompile a kernel if you're using an old kernel.) FYI this system made a business cable connection work in a house of 31 college students, so speed isn't a problem.
Why? The market cannot support 3 consoles, plain and simple. Most people will have one of the three. Some power gamers will have 2; almost nobody will have all three. So now you're a game developer and you're making a game. You've gotta pick one, because the costs of developing for all three are prohibitive (unless you're EA making crappy licensed movie games.)
The net result here is that with more consoles in the market, each game will sell *fewer* copies. I know there were a few Xbox games I wanted to play, but didn't, because I already had a PS2 and a gamecube and couldn't justify shelling out $150 for another console.
Nintendo will probably be the next casualty (it happened to Atari when Sega challenged Nintendo, and it happened to Sega when MS challenged Sony and Nintendo.) That's a shame; I can only hope they will remake themself as a top-tier game publisher/developer because their games have always been great. They've pretty much bowed out of the hardware arms race with the Nintendo Revolution, a low-powered hardware design compared to the PS3 and XB360. Too bad they don't have the developer support anymore to make it work.
Actually Nintendo has been making games for a hell of a lot longer than MS or Sony have been around :) They started as a playing card manufacturer in the late 1800s and put out Mario Bros. in ~1985 and well, the rest is history.
There hasn't really been a noteworthy game release in the past six months on any platform. GTA: San Andreas was the last 'Killer App' and it's so expensive to just produce a par game that the development cycle has really slowed to just a handful of companies who can consistantly put out games before getting bought by EA.
PC, PS2, Xbox.. none of them have had any decent releases recently. Most everyone I know has gotten bored of and then gone back to World of Warcraft because there really isn't anything out there. The video game world is dying a slow death due to the skyrocketing costs of game development. There are maybe half a dozen big releases a year on any platform; just like hollywood most game companies are mired in a rut of endless sequels to dead franchises. Even GTA is getting old. Give us something new.
I think you're missing the point.
Basically, the OP is saying that this guy is probably the kind of guy who sits around at a strip club all day doing blow off some chick's ass. Do that to the wrong guy's girlfriend and you're liable to get your head beaten in. Which is probably closer to the truth than a real-life SpamAssassin.
Yeah this is a troll. If not, you need to take an economics class.
The way corporations operate may be bad, but it's no worse than the nobles in the monarchies of europe. Corporations made it possible for the common man to get involved in ownership of a large company, which was previously limited to only the super-rich. At least now, if I see Microsoft getting rich and I am jealous, I can just go buy a piece of Microsoft and share in the wealth.
You posit a socialist world, which Soviet Russia proved was good on paper, but a spectacular failure in practice. The Chinese are learning from the mistakes of the USSR by EMBRACING corporate capitalism while keeping the government involved.
Greed runs the world. Bitch about it all you like, but this is the way it always has been and always will be. The only way to be safe from greed is to be greedy yourself. Even if the US were to pass laws forbidding profitable corporations, nothing would change. They would simply move to China or Russia or Canada. If you are not greedy, someone else will be and you'll just be poor. If everyone is not greedy, it just takes one greedy person to amass resources and abuse power. On the other hand, if everyone is greedy, things will eventually work out.
20th century economics has taught us that governments cannot control the economy, they can only guide it. The economy is controlled by market forces; the mass will of the people. It is folly to try and "dream of a better system" because the system dictates itself. Even if you could think of something better, the goal could only be to make more money, or else nobody will bother.
Stop trolling on slashdot and go out and learn stuff about the world. We all wish for the world to be a better place but there are some facts about the world and the nature of people that we have to operate within.
Best part is that cops in speed traps in Texas make it a point to show up for court, just to deter people from doing it. Any of the small townships inside Houston or Austin are especially bad (Westlake, Lakeway, West University, Bellaire, etc.)
It could be worse though; it could be Louisiana. If you are an out of state motorist who gets a ticket, you get escorted to the nearest courthouse by the officer where you get to enter your plea.
Hah, nah, you don't stop having fun, you just usually start enjoying other forms of fun (going to the bar with your buddies, having kinky sex with your girlfriend, whatever) over sitting around your apartment playing video games with a bunch of 13 year old kids (ever played WoW with teamspeak? yeah, the average age of this game is about 13.) I had a raging WoW addiction my last semester in college, but I was taking 9 hours and I could still play WoW and do everything else I wanted to do.
There are a lot of people who, through either a physical handicap or just reclusiveness don't get out much. If you lead a "normal" life with a 9-5 job or friends and a family, you will never be able to compete with the best. So accept it, move on, and you can still have some fun with the game, but it shouldn't be the focus of your life.
Also keep in mind that while Krol Blade is a good weapon, the "best" stuff (the items that will turn you into a 1 man asskicking machine) is not even available for purchase. The best sellable equpiment is UBRS level gear (lv 50-55 epics) which any dope with 2 weeks to run UBRS will get something comparable anyway.
Anyone who has played WoW past 60 knows how often the auction house gets used.. It's primarily a source for sub-60 items and equipment; most of the higher level stuff is privately traded among friends.
I don't see this ruining the economy. Gold was already very plentiful without having to give it away. Scarcity was always a part of WoW, but there is a point at which you outgrow the economy right around the middle of Molten Core, and I think a lot of players are at or near that point.